Dana Gardner: Welcome to the next BriefingsDirect podcast as we explore the changing role and impact of content marketing,
using the IT industry as an example. Just as companies now communicate
with their consumers and prospects in much different ways, with higher
emphasis on social interactions, user feedback, big dataanalysis, and even more content to drive conversations, so too the IT industry has abruptly changed.

There's more movement to cloud models, to mobile applications,
to leveraging data at every chance -- and they are also facing
lower-margin subscription business models. The margin for error is
shrinking in the IT industry. If any industry is the poster child for
how to deal with rapid change on all fronts, it is surely the global
information technology market.

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Gardner:
Lora, you and I have been talking about marketing for years now. We're
in an interesting field, and it’s been such a dynamic time. I have some interesting ideas about
where technology is going and where marketing is intercepting, and how they
are both changing.

So, let’s start at a high level. Content marketing has proven to be very successful, and you and I have had a
hand in this. Creating compelling stories, narratives about what’s going
on, and how people can learn from peers as they go through problems
and solve them, has become a mainstay in marketing. From your
perspective, why is content marketing so important? Why has it been so
successful?

Kratchounova: There are couple of
reasons for that. The pace of change is tremendous now. People are
trying to get their bearings on what’s going on in their markets, and a
lot of times, they need to get educated. What has changed with social media
now, information is a lot more immediate and transparent, and you can
get it from many more sources than the just online presence of a
company, for example.

The top-down modeling in the
marketing is changing. We used to rely on companies to tell us how to
think about the world, and now we can form our own opinions. As we
realize that the customer is in the driver’s seat, they educate
themselves, and they make the right decisions about how to go about
change, companies are realizing that they need to feed into that flow
and be part of that discussion. So content marketing has been so
successful, because you become an educator, not just selling to people,
and especially in IT.

Gardner: And I think
people have become much more accustomed to conversations, rather than
just a one-direction information flow. "We're the seller and we're going
to tell you what it is." Now, people want to relate. They want to hear
what others have to think. It’s much more of an actual conversation.

Ongoing conversation

Kratchounova:
Exactly. Look at any IT domain. It’s interesting when we look at who is
influencing and who the main voices in it are, who the voices that
people consider experts are. You pretty much consistently see reporters,
journalists, and the analysts folks like you, but then we see that
there are a lot of C-level executives from IT companies who are becoming
that kind of a voice as well.

That just points to the need for that ongoing conversation, the need for sharing at all levels of the buyer funnel. Once people have bought into a selection, they need to make sure of adoption, and they are maximizing the investment.

So
the conversation is very important, and the immediacy of having access
to folks and having the ability to exchange a few thoughts on Twitter or LinkedIn
has changed the dynamic completely. So it’s absolutely about
conversations and storytelling, but it's still mapped to the buyer’s
funnel.

People are still educating and still looking at
options for a change or for replacement, one or the other, until they
select the people they want to work with. And it’s usually people in
brands. It's not just that they want to work with this company, but the
people behind it. We're moving more to a people economy.

Gardner:
As you point out, you can get to the real source of the knowledge
nowadays. Publishing is available to anybody whether they're tweeting,
blogging, posting on Facebook,
or putting something up on their company website. Anybody who has
something to say can say it. It can get indexed and it can be made
available to anybody who wants to hear about that particular
topic.

The
ability to publish is great, and it
democratizes the means of how we communicate with each other and educate
each other, but yet you still have to earn it.

Most
people now don’t just sit back and wait for information to reach them.
They're proactive. They go out, they start to search, they do hashtag
searches on Twitter, and they can do Google or Bing on web.

It’s
much more of, "I know something; I'm putting it out there." And there's
another case of someone saying, "I need to know something; I am seeking
it." They come together on their own. The content makes that possible.
The better the content, the better the likelihood that those in a need
to know and those in a need to tell come together.

Kratchounova:
Exactly, but I think you hit on something very important. Everybody can
publish, and a lot of people are publishing. Yet, we're interested in a
love for your people, falling in love for your people, and what they
have to say.

The ability to publish is great, and it
democratizes the means of how we communicate with each other and educate
each other, but yet you still have to earn it. This is very important.
People who really are influential are usually domain experts and they're
there to help other people. That’s the other aspect of it that both
companies and their marketing teams and their executives need to think
about. You have to actively participate and show your expertise, it
doesn’t come for granted.

Important of curation

Gardner:
And there's another aspect to greasing the skids between the knowledge
and the acquirer of the knowledge, and that is content curation. There are
people who point at things, give it credence, and say that it's a good
thing, you should read it; or that’s a bad thing, don’t waste your time
-- and that helps refine this.

Kratchounova: It’s pretty exciting.

Gardner:
There are machines doing the same thing. There are algorithms, there's
indexing, there's both human and machine aspects of winnowing down the
good stuff and providing it to people in a need to know, and that’s when
we are going to get more powerful.

Kratchounova: Great. I'm sure you know about Narrative Science.
I've had a professional crush on this company for few years now. They
take data, turn it into storytelling, and they think this is phenomenal.
Obviously, that’s not going to replace some of the human storytelling
that needs to happen, but some of the data storytelling will come from
technology. This is one particular application where marketing and
technology come together to bring something completely new into life.

Gardner:
So we can get knowledge through expertise or we can get knowledge
through experience, someone who has gone through it already and is
willing to share that with you. If you're acquiring IT, it’s super
important to avail yourself of everything, because it changes so rapidly
and the costs are high.

IT
depends on the IT buyer, because we can’t necessarily lump them together
and ask how the IT buyer goes about it. There are people with different
needs, and it depends on their role.

If you make a big mistake in how you're designing a data center,
you're out millions of dollars, your products don’t work, and your front office are going to come screaming
down on you. You have to make the big decisions and you have to make
them correctly in IT. It’s not just a service to the business; it is the
business.

So, let’s think about the IT industry in
particular, and then think about how content marketing as we’ve
discussed is powerful. How do IT people acquire content marketing? Do
they get it through websites, emails, or tweets? Is it delivered to them
at a webinar that they opt into? How does content marketing reach
somebody who's an IT buyer?

Kratchounova: IT
depends on the IT buyer, because we can’t necessarily lump them together
and ask how the IT buyer goes about it. There are people with different
needs, and it depends on their role. If you're CIO or CTO, there is a
different mix of channels and sources you use. If you're on the dev or
on the ops side and looking for specific solutions, you're going into
completely different channels.

For example, if you're a DevOps professional, you're maybe on Stack Overflow and you might be seeking advice from other folks. You might be on GitHub and sharing open-source code and getting feedback on that.

If
you're a CIO or CTO, what we have found working with number of
different companies, be that global companies or maybe companies that
are growing, is that they do seek their peers to validate what the peers
are going through. One of the best things that companies can do, when
they try to talk to the C-level, is expose some of those connections
that they already have from their customers. Make sure that the
customers are part of the discussion, and they can chime in.

Another
important source of information for the C level in IT would be folks
like you, analysts, and strategic system integrators like Accenture and Deloitte,
because these folks are exposed to the kinds of challenges that a CIO
or CTO would go through. So they have a lot to bring to the table in
terms of risk mitigation, optimal deployment, and maximization of the
investment in IT. Making those connections and sharing those experiences
we have seen work really, really well.

Let me just
throw this in as well. The other thing we have seen is that the C level
is still going on Google. They're still doing the searches. We have
compelling data, across the board, that in any B2B
complex enterprise environment folks are self-educating as well. So
it’s not a question of either/or; it’s what’s the right mix for each
company depending on channels, depending on where people sit.

Spectrum of content

Gardner:
So there is a spectrum of content, some highly technical and defined,
on places like GitHub that are germane to a technologist. Then, there is
that spectrum up from there to a higher level toward peer review of
products and peer review of solutions. Then, there are more business topics about what is strategic, what’s the forward direction,
how do I understand at an architectural-level decision processes, and
where can I go for more information to find out what’s coming down the
pike and then put it in place.

Kratchounova: Think about Spiceworks.
They're probably at five million IT professionals at this point, and
the community is there for a reason. So again, with each particular,
there isn’t one size fits all. One thing that we always recommend to
folks is that if you’re looking to develop an influential strategy and
approach IT, it really depends on what domains you span.

You find that even if you're doing mobile application development,
the folks who were really influential and set the standards of that
stage are somewhat different from the folks who are concerned with
security in mobile app development. So there isn’t necessarily one pool
of influencers that you need to go then to develop a relationship and
understand what’s in their mind. It really depends on your domain.

Gardner:
So if you're a marketer and you recognize that quality content is super
important, you need to have a spectrum of content. It needs to be some
content that would be germane to a technologist that’s highly detailed, a
how-to type. You need to have peer review and stories, case studies,
testimonial type content where the customer is telling what they’ve
done, why it benefited them, and what you can learn from that.

You
also need to have higher-level discussions with experts to help people
chart the next course, the strategic level. So content needs to come
across a spectrum, and we recognize that the way in which people get
that content might be through search. It might be through web, e-mail,
webinars, webcasts, reading certain online sites, listening to certain
Twitter feeds or groups, or having a select group of people that you
follow. All of that happens.

But what’s interesting to
me, Lora, is that all has to do with the web. But what we're seeing in IT is
a rapid movement toward mobile apps, rather than just the web. And in
many cases, they're starting to overtake the web as to where people
spend their time. I'm sure you're using a smartphone and you have mobile
apps. You're not going on the web to find a cab; you’re going to the
Uber app to find a cab.

If you're looking for a
restaurant review, you’re not necessarily going on the web and doing a
search. You’re going into a specific app on Yelp, OpenTable, or somewhere else to find out where your restaurants are and you’re going into Google Maps to find out how to get there.

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So
more-and-more, we're seeing, on the consumer side, people using mobile
apps for more of their processes, for their inquiry, for their actual
productivity. Then, on the
enterprise side, the business-to-employee (B2E) side, we're seeing people using cloud services.

We're moving more toward mobile applications, cloud
services, an API-driven world that leverages big data and analytics in
order to put context into process. It's all about user experiences, and mobile delivers the best. How then does content continue to reach people? Do we
lose the ability to deliver content when they are in apps?

Different perspective

Kratchounova: I have a different perspective on what you're describing. I don’t know that we
are moving to a mobile app experience necessarily. When we think about
the apps and the examples you gave -- Yelp or Uber -- yes, they're best-of-breed applications that we use because these are the most frequently used applications.

But
what you're seeing is actually a digital transformation. Digital no
longer means the web, as we know it, going online through your computer.
You're actually navigating on a mobile device. So it’s this digital
transformation that’s happening, and the trend that we're seeing is
aggregation.

It’s not about one individual app, but
it’s more about what is the Flipboard within the enterprise. You're
seeing that sort of aggregation bubbling up to the top because
information overload is a huge problem. People can’t prioritize anymore.
They can’t toggle among those different applications and companies.

For
example, one of our clients, not to necessarily add a plug for them,
actually is very germane to the discussion. Harmon.ie does exactly
that.

Once
you
understand, then you understand what a partner is trying to do. Why are
they are here, what’s the context, what’s the most logical next step or
the optimal next step?

In
those kinds of environments, what we're finding and where I totally
agree with you, is the ability to read and understand context, so that
you can support the user, be that an employee with internal work
experience, or external customers, to support them to get the job done.

The
role of content is actually merging with big data, because big data is
helping us to understand context and say, "What do we serve this person
here?" On the marketing side, and the lingo side it’s more about ongoing
customer journeys. Think about the same thing on the employee side,
ongoing employee journeys or partner journeys.

Once you
understand, then you understand what a partner is trying to do. Why are
they are here, what’s the context, what’s the most logical next step or
the optimal next step? Now, content becomes both an ability for people
to find something, but also for marketers or product development folks. I
think those functions are emerging as well to deliver the right content
in the right format so that the user can get the job done. That’s my
perspective on that.

Gardner: There's no
disagreement from me on this issue of context to process, context to
location, context to need for knowledge all being much more granular and
powerful going forward. What I am concerned about is that, when I talk
to developers, the vast majority of them are much more interested in a
mobile-first, cloud-first world.

They're not much
interested in building what we used to think of as big honking
applications in the enterprise. They're much more interested in how to
bring services -- and microservices -- together in context to provide a better productive
outcome and how to leverage low-cost services in APIs and from any cloud.

Discovering inference

So,
to me, it becomes, on one hand, all the more important to have the
ability to deliver content contextually into these processes, but at the
same time these processes are becoming fragmented. They're going across
hybrid-cloud environments, they include both what we call cloud and SaaS, and I'm not sure where the marketer now can get enough inference to support the injection of content appropriately.

The
ways that it’s been done now is usually through the web where we have
links, and we have code, and we can do cookies. It’s sort of like, it’s
Web 1.0 mechanisms by which marketers are injecting content, but we are
moving not only pass Web 2.0, we're into Web 3.0 cloud platform. To me this
is a big question mark.

Kratchounova: It is a
question mark. I don’t know that there is going to be one mode of
delivering what we're talking about or one approach or one framework.
I'll give you one example. Look at how web content management has
changed. It used to be about managing pages and updating content. Now,
web content management is becoming the Marketing Command Center, if you
look at a web content management system like Sitefinity, for example.

Now,
marketers can deal with the customer through his own mobile and on the
web, so they can inject the content that needs to happen there. The
reason they can do this now is because there is this ability, the
analytics that come from all of these customer interactions of you,
actually creating cohorts of people as they're going through your web
experience or online experience. You know why they're there and what’s
the optimal path for them to get where they need to be.

You're
seeing this ability to distribute content to post content to
people, but in a much more contextual way. So, there is going to be a
pull and push, but the push is getting a lot smarter and very
contextual.

So,
you're seeing this ability to distribute content to post content to
people, but in a much more contextual way. So, there is going to be a
pull and push, but the push is getting a lot smarter and very
contextual.

Gardner: So it’s incumbent upon us
who are examining this marketing evolution in the context of the IT
industry to create that spectrum of content to make it valuable, to make
it appropriate and not too commercial or crass, but useful. And at the
same time now, think about how to get this in front of right people at
the right time.

It seems to me that if I'm an IT company, and more and more of my services, whether it’s a B2B, B2C,
B2E, or all of the above, I need to be thinking about ways that I'm
going to communicate with my existing universe or market and move them
toward new products and services as they need them in context of their
process.

Think about this in a B2C environment in
retail, where I am walking through Wal-Mart. I have my smartphone and,
as I turn the corner, they know that now I am interested in home goods,
and they are going to start to incentivize me to buy something. That’s
kind of an understood mechanism by which my location and the fact that I
turned a corner and made a decision provides an inference that then
they can react to with content or information.

But take
that now to the B2B environment where I'm in a business setting. I'm in
procurement, I'm in product development, or I'm looking for a supply chain efficiency. I want to move into a new geographic location and I
need to find the means to do that. All of those things are also like
turning a corner in a Wal-Mart, except you're in a business application
using cloud services, using a mobile device and apps.

If I'm an IT vendor, I'm going to want to have content or
information that I can bring to that situation, perhaps even through an
example of what other people have done when they face that same process crossroads. So the content can be more important and more germane. These are
multi-million-dollar decisions in some cases.

Don’t you
think that big companies should be starting to make content with the
idea that it’s going to become part of their application services, part
of their cloud delivery services, and that they need to use big data and
analytics to know when to inject it?

Understanding context

Kratchounova:
I absolutely agree. I think that difference between the example you
just gave for Wal-Mart and a B2B environment is that, in Wal-Mart, you
don’t need to understand so much about who the person is, what their
role is, whether they work at an accounting firm or whether they are a
physician, for example.

In a B2B environment you do
need to understand context, and context is the location or the point
where they are in their journey, whatever that journey maybe, and their
role as well, because different people do have different decisions to
make.

It’s a little bit more complex to bring context
in a B2B environment, but it’s absolutely essential. You used the word
inference. We always get enamored by the concept of the big data and
guess what, once the machines are there, they're going to analyze
everything and it's going to be this perfect world of marketing where
everyone is aligned.

Just look at the history of
marketing. We don’t know ourselves as people. We individually don’t know
ourselves as well, let alone someone else getting to know us that well.
Inference is very important, but it’s going to be a balance between
inferring what the person needs and allowing the person to customize
this experience as well. So it’s going to come both ways.

Some
people still believe
that it’s a relationship-based world and, therefore, there's no need for
a digital experience for their customers or for their potential buyers,
which is actually never the case.

Some
people going to one extreme or the other. Some people still believe
that it’s a relationship-based world and, therefore, there's no need for
a digital experience for their customers or for their potential buyers,
which is actually never the case. Other people believe that it’s all
digital; therefore they don’t need to touch them in any other way, which
is rarely the case, especially in IT.

Gardner:
I also suggest to you that the data
is more readily available, because I, as an employer, as a corporation,
control what’s going on. I know what that employee is doing. I know what
apps they're using. I know what data they're seeking.

They're going to
provide a feed of data back to you about what’s going on, on those apps
from your very own employees.
What
I'm suggesting then, as we begin to think about closing out this
fascinating conversation, is that you need to have content, stories, and
customers lined up, so that you can uncover their path to truth, their
path to value, and have that content context-ready. Not only you are going to be
using it in webinars, webcasts, podcasts, blogs, but pretty soon, if my
hypothesis is correct, you're going to be using that content in the
context of process and inside of applications in cloud services and on mobile devices.

Way of the future

Kratchounova:
Maybe this is an opportunity, because it is the way of the future, and
some people are more mature and others are less mature, but maybe we can
bring other people into the discussion and see what other folks in the
field think about where the content is going, how to contextualize and
how to deliver it. One of the biggest question is how do we scale this.
You can still do a meaningful experience or create a meaningful
experience one-on-one, but it’s hard to recreate that even if your
customers are 200, 500, or even 5,000 within the IT space.

Gardner:
You also have to remember that people's connections to apps, cloud services and context-aware processes are only going to increase. The Internet of Things and new classes of devices like the Apple Watch are expanding the end points and ways to connect to them. One of the things that’s important with the Apple Watch
functionally is that it’s very good at alerts and notifications. It can
also detect a lot of context of what you're doing physically and your
location, and it can relate, because it integrates to your phone, with
what you're doing with applications and cloud services.

Wouldn’t
it be interesting if you're wearing an Apple Watch or equivalent,
you're in a business setting, and you come up against a problem that you
might not even know yet, but all of these services working together are
going to say, "That person is going to be facing a problem; they are
going to need to make a decision. Let’s put some information, content,
and use cases together for them that will help them as they face that
situation to make a better decision." That’s the kind of role I think
we're heading toward.

Before we sign off, Lora, tell me more about
Scratch Marketing and Media, what you do and why that’s related to this
discussion we have had today.

Find out what Scratch Marketing and MediaCan Do for YouClick Here to Access A Free Webinar on Market Reputation

Kratchounova:Scratch Marketing and Media is an integrated marketing agency. We help
B2B technology companies with market growth. Sometimes that means
helping the sales folks within IT companies and sometimes it means
working with the marketing folks on things like content marketing
programs, PR, and all its relations, and influence their relations in
social media.

Gardner: And how could they find out more information about Scratch Marketing Media?

Gardner:
I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been discussing the
change in role and impact of content marketing using the IT industry and
the great changes happening there as an example. We've seen how the
nature of marketing with customer sharing and big data and the rapidly
evolving technology industry coming together, perhaps gives us a
bellwether that it will happen among many other industries. So, with
that I want to thank our guest, Lora Kratchounova, the Founder and Principal at Scratch Marketing and
Media in Cambridge, Mass. Thanks so much, Lora.

Kratchounova: You're welcome, Dana.

Gardner:
And a big thank you to our audience for joining this special
BriefingsDirect discussion on the changing impact of content marketing.

I'm
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host.
Don’t forget to come back next time to BriefingsDirect. We've certainly
enjoyed having the time to be with you, and we hope that you found this
valuable, too.Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS.Download the transcript.

Transcript
of a BriefingsDirect discussion on the changing nature of content as
people and companies move to a greater use of apps, big data and context-aware processes. Copyright
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions,
your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on IT
innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

We’ll
learn more about how HTC has lowered total storage utilization cost
while bringing in a common management view to improve problem
resolution, automate resources allocation, and more fully gain
compliance -- as well as set the stage for broader virtualization benefits.

To learn how HTC gains better total storage management, please join me now in welcoming Philip Sellers, Senior System Administrator at HTC in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Welcome, Philip.

Storage Operations ManagerReduce Total Costs -- Increase ProductivityTry It Now

Sellers: HTC is the largest telephone
cooperative in the nation. We serve the Myrtle Beach and surrounding
South Carolina area. We started out as a telephone company, but at this
point, we're a full-line telecommunications company, doing cable TV,
internet security, home automation, and through our partnership with AT
and T, we also do wireless service.

Gardner: Now, you are not HTC, the handset maker from Asia; you are an entirely different company.

Sellers: A completely different company, although we do sell a few of those handsets with our wireless division.

Gardner: You told me when we talked earlier that you are a reluctant storage administrator. You started out as a VMware in virtualization admin. How did you get from one to the other, and why is it important for your organization?

Common story

Sellers:
It’s probably a common story in a lot of shops. As VMware became more
prolific in our environment, the line started to blur between networking
and VMware, and storage and VMware. So I was pulled more into those
directions as the primary VMware admin for our company. That gave me the
opportunity to dig in and start to learn an area of IT that was new to
me.

Gardner: Philip, tell us a little bit about the scale: how many virtual machines (VMs), how many employees, what sort of a size organization are you?

Sellers:
We have 700 or so employees at this point, and almost that number of VMs
that we're managing. We have a couple of different storage
platforms today with the HP EVA and HP 3PAR StoreServ in-house.

We also use lots of other things. We have HP StoreOnce for backup and HP StoreVirtual for some of our smaller needs, such as remote offices.

Gardner:
What kind of storage workloads are we dealing with here? Is this all of
the apps across the company? What set
of IT workloads are you addressing?

One of the great benefits we've realized with VMware is the ability to
have a good test and development platform to mirror what we have in
production.

Sellers: The group that I'm a part of is actually the internal IT group. So we're running line-of-business
applications, not the things that our customers are delivered service
across, but the things that run our business to take orders, support
financial operations, and those sorts of things.

And
we're running a mixture of test and dev and production. One of the great
benefits we've realized with VMware is the ability to have a good test
and development platform to mirror what we have in production. So it
runs the gamut for internal IT.

Gardner: When
you start to think about progressing to a better utilization and the
rationalization of storage, rather than have overlapping or disjointed
storage capabilities, what sort of philosophy do you have about storage?
How do you think that you can make the whole greater than sum of the
parts and get those utilization benefits over time?

Deeper insight

Sellers:
It’s something that I learned back in my virtualization days. For me,
it’s huge to have visibility into what’s going to in your storage. One
of the benefits of our transition to HP 3PAR storage is that we've been able
to realize much deeper levels of insight into what’s going on inside
of the arrays.

You know, as we were making that switch,
we evaluated other third parties, ultimately deciding on the mid-range
7000 3PAR series for our environment and for our needs. That visibility
has been key for us.

But it’s also come with a set of
challenges, because we now have multiple storage consoles that we need
to manage from. We have different places that we need to check. One of
the keys for us is having somewhere where we can see it all, or get a
better idea of the entire environment from an end-to-end perspective.

One of the other huge benefits that we've realized is some level of disaster avoidance.

That’s
one of the things we learned from our VMware days. We were flying blind
early on, and that caused us problems and potential problems, because
we didn’t know something was going on. One of our main goals is
establishing good visibility into our storage environment.

Gardner:
So, it’s not just enough to modernize your storage and improve your
storage capabilities, but at the same time
you really need to address the management issues and consolidate
management. In doing so, what have been some of the payoffs that you can
recall? How has this helped your organization better provide IT
services internally?

Sellers: From a
performance standpoint, our former primary storage platform was not
great at telling us how close we were to the edge of our performance
capabilities. We never knew exactly what was going to cause a problem or
the unpredictability of virtual workloads in particular. We never knew
where we were going to have issues.

Being able to see
into that has allowed us to prevent help desk cost for slow services, for
problems that maybe we didn’t even know were going on initially. One of
the other huge benefits that we've realized is new levels of disaster
avoidance.

Gardner: And what do you mean by that, rather than disaster recovery (DR), which is taking care of business after we have had some terrible thing happen? How do you head that off?

Disaster avoidance

Sellers: I know that’s not an industry term, but that’s what I like to call it, because in our environment, we have two data centers
that are fairly close together. What we've implemented is the HP 3PAR
StoreServ metro storage clustering feature, which they call peer
persistence, but it's VMware’s metro storage clustering. We've also done
that with Windows clustering as well.

We have two
sets of 3PARs in different data centers, and they act as one. So, they
replicate synchronously between the two locations and they fail-over
"automagically." I don’t know how else to say it. It just seamlessly
fails-over between the two sites.

For our environment,
we were at a particularly vulnerable state if we lost a data array,
because so many things were pointing at it. Now if we lose a single data
array it’s not a big deal. It fails-over and it continues running.

Gardner: And when you say vulnerable, I think you're talking about hurricanes?

Sellers: A lot of times we plan for those large natural disasters, but sometimes it’s the small ones that get us like UPS
maintenance or something as simple as a power outage. Maybe your
generator doesn’t kick in in time. Sometimes, that can be a disaster of
almost the same scale as a hurricane to your business operations -- just
from something simple.

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Gardner:
So the storage management capability has provided "automagically," as
you say, this disaster avoidance. That’s a pretty important metric. Do
you have any idea of the value of that to your business, and maybe start
to put that in dollar terms? It seems a pretty profound difference.

Sellers:
I can’t necessarily put it into dollar terms. That’s not the world that
I work in, but I know that anytime there is downtime to our
customer relationship advisers, and the people in the field, that’s bad
for business.

So we're avoiding those kinds of
situations as best we can. We could lose an entire data center site and,
with technology built into the VMware layer and into the HP 3PAR layer, it
will come back up. It may be reboot of a server, but we try to do
everything we can to avoid disaster situations today, rather than just
plan for needing to fail a data center over to "site B," and go through
all of that testing.

Gardner: Let’s get down to
some more brass tacks on actual storage utilization benefits. Any
thoughts or recollections about what this means in terms of utilization,
so no more worries about running out of storage base or capacity?

Seeing benefits

Sellers:
Yeah, the HP 3PAR platform has been really great inside of our environment
because we realize the marketing term of the "two-to-one thin
provisioning." We're seeing that benefit.

When I looked
at the console before I came here, we were seeing around a 2.3 to 1
compaction, and that’s without deduplication and some of the other newer
technologies that are capable in the 3PAR platform. We may be able to
realize better than that in the future.

Gardner:
We've talked about disaster avoidance. We've recognized some
significant savings in the provisioning and utilization. Let’s go back
to management. What sort of benefits are you getting now with a more
holistic approach and how does that help, perhaps on a data lifecycle
basis?

Sellers: One of the ways that we're
approaching that set of problems is with storage resource management
software. We've traditionally used a piece of software called Storage Essentials,
which HP makes. It’s heterogeneous storage-management software, so it
can look at all of our different arrays and looks at our backup arrays
and our primary storage arrays, as well as our back-up environment, and
pulls all that information together.

We've been able to leverage that from a reporting
standpoint to be able to view and pinpoint growth to see how see things
are running from a dashboard view.

We've been
able to leverage that from a reporting standpoint to be able to view and
pinpoint growth to see how see things are running from a dashboard
view. Over the last six months or so, I've been working in an
early-release program for a product called HP Storage Operations Management.

This
software is the next iteration of Storage Essentials. It’s got a much
more approachable and modern user interface, which brings up and
aggregates our total environment so that we can get a full picture of
what’s going on there. Then, we can drill down and see at specific
levels how things are performing, what our utilization trend is, or how
much time we have until a device or a storage pool is full.

Those
are things that keep us out of the really dangerous situations in
getting down to a time where you're in a mission critical season, maybe
the holidays or something where it’s heavy sales, and you run out of disk
space and you can’t get your procurement cycle to get storage quickly
enough.

Those things are just as dangerous as the
hurricane that we were talking about earlier from a business operations
perspective. Tools like this help us to manage and see what’s going on
in the environment and help us plan and act proactively.

Gardner:
I could really see why your philosophy is visibility and management
oversight. It comes back again and again as a huge force multiplier benefit.

Room to grow

Sellers:
Absolutely. There's a saying that ignorance is bliss. When you're
flying blind, that’s true, until it catches up with you, and it
eventually overtakes you. We have lots and lots of room to grow
and capabilities where we're at today. This new version of management
storage resource management product has lots of great potential, too.

It’s
an initial release. So, it’s got somewhat limited support for different
storage families and that kind of thing, but they're working to bring
in additional support and make it all that the previous product was, and
much more -- and that’s visible from the initial release.

So
we're excited about seeing where that can help us, particularly because
one of the switches in this new product is that it’s not just a
collect, an analytics reporting system. It’s a dashboard system where it
takes that analytics and brings it back to a dashboard to let you drill
down in to it and see it real clearly in near-real-time. I won’t say in
real-time, but within whatever amount of time you configure.

Gardner:
How about your future business activities? How well you can support
them? I know that media is a fast-changing business. Do you feel
confident now that when your superiors in your organization come to you
and say, "We need this," that you're in a better position to hop-to
quickly? Is there a sense of confidence that you can take on market
change better?

We feel confident that we have room to grow and that we can do so in shorter terms.

Sellers:
I certainly believe so. We've been able to adapt and change more
quickly because of changes that we've made with VMware, with HP 3PAR. We
feel confident that we have room to grow and that we can do so in
shorter terms. We've been able to try and look at new things like VDI
deployments to help us with compliance-type issues, where
we're under regulations and have to patch and have to ensure that our
systems are secure.

And so we are looking at things
like that now that we were afraid to put on to primary storage in the
past. It's something where we think we have a good mix today for the
future.

Gardner: What advice might you might
provide others who would be approaching a disparate storage environment? And maybe share your philosophy about visibility and anticipation being
better than reaction. Maybe they are also seeking disaster avoidance,
rather than disaster recovery. For those folks that are not quite as far
along in this journey as you are, what might you suggest for them to be
thinking about -- or that you wish you knew about earlier?

Sellers:
There is definitely some low hanging fruit, and that’s what visibility
will bring to you -- the ability to handle some of that low-hanging
fruit. If you have a situation where your storage team is siloed away
from your server team, bringing something in that can see both of those
sides and map together that whole environment is a real easy way to
identify inefficiency.

Those are LUNs
that maybe are provisioned -- but not in use. There is no I/O on them.
That’s a dollar amount immediately reclaimed. Finding VMs and things
with visibility. These tools can look in to the VMware environment where
you can see that you have lots and lots of VMs that are shut down.

There
are easy things that you can do to start that process, no matter what
your storage platform is. I think that’s a universal thing. If you have
something that can gain you visibility in to the environment there are
some easy things and easy wins that you can bring back.

Further improvements

Gardner: And those of course provide grist for the mill of further improvements and further budget to accomplish even more.

Sellers:
Absolutely. If you want to make a storage platform switch or if you
want to do other improvements and gain more efficiency, this gives you a
little bit of extra room, some wiggle room, to make those things
reality. We spent an awful lot of our budget just in keeping the lights
on, keeping things up and running. Anytime you can gain some wiggle room
from that budget, it certainly allows you the ability to look at
innovation.

And we
have heard why bringing a common management view in to play improves
problem resolution and automates resource allocation more fully -- and
therefore gains better compliance and sets the stage for broader
virtualization benefits.

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Gardner:
And I would like to thank our audience as well for joining us for this
data and information governance innovation case study discussion. I'm
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for
this ongoing series of HP-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for
listening, and come back next time.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions,
your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on IT
innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Our next data center innovation panel discussion focuses on the changing role of IT service management (ITSM)
in a hybrid computing world. As IT systems, resources, assets, and
information are more scattered across more enterprise locations and
devices -- as well as across various service environments -- how can IT
leaders hope to know where their "stuff" is, who’s using it, how to secure
it, and then accurately pay for it?

Well, it turns out that advanced software asset management (SAM)
methods can enforce compliance, reduce risk, cut costs, and enhance
end-user productivity -- even as the complexity of IT itself increases.

We'll hear from four IT leaders about how they have improved ITSM despite
such challenges, and we'll learn how the increased use of big data and analytics
when applied to ITSM improves inventory control and management. We'll
also hear how a service brokering role can also be used to great
advantage, thanks to ITSM-generated information.

To learn more about how ITSM solves multiple problems for IT, we're joined by our panel, Charl Joubert, a change and configuration management expert based in Pretoria, South Africa. Welcome, Charl.

Charl Joubert: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with Julien Kuijper, an expert in asset and license management based in Paris. Welcome, Julien.

Julien Kuijper: Thank you. Good afternoon.

Gardner: We're also here with Patrick Bailly, IT Quality and Process Director at Steria, also based in Paris. Welcome, Patrick.

Patrick Bailly: Thank you. Good afternoon.

Gardner: And lastly, Edward Jackson, Operational System Support Manager at Redcentric, based in Harrogate, UK. Welcome, Edward.

Edward Jackson: Thank you. Good afternoon.

Gardner: Let’s talk about modern SAM, software asset management. There seems to be a lot going on
with getting more information about software and how it’s distributed
and used. Julien, tell us how you're seeing organizations deal with this
issue.

Complicated circle

Kuijper:
SAM has to square quite a complicated circle. One is compliance in a
company, compliance with regard to software installation and usage, and
also ensuring that while doing this, we must ensure that the software
that is entering a company isn't dangerous. It's things like not letting
a virus come in, opening threats or complications. Those are three very
technical and very factual environments.

But, you also want to please your end-user. If you
don’t please your end-user and you don’t give them the ability to work,
they're going to be frustrated. They're going to complain about IT. It’s
already a complicated enough.

You have to square that circle by implementing
the correct processes first, while giving the correct information around
how to behave in the end-to-end software lifecycle.

Gardner:
And asset management when it comes to software is not small, there are some very big numbers -- and costs -- involved.

Kuijper:
It’s actually a very inconvenient truth. An audit from a publisher or a
vendor can easily reach 7 or 8 digits, and a typical company has
between 10 and 50 publishers. So, at 7 digits per publisher, you can
easily do the math. That’s typically the financial risk.

You
also have a big reputation risk. If you don’t pay for software and you
are caught, you end up being in the press. You don’t want your company,
your branding, to be at that level of exposure.

You
have to bring this risk to the attention of IT leaders at the CIO level,
but they don’t really want to hear that, because it costs a lot. When
they hear this risk, they can't avoid investment, and the investment can
be quite large as well.

Typically, if this investment is reaching five percent of your overall
yearly software spending, you're on the right level. It’s a big number,
but still it’s worth investing.

But you have to
compare this investment with regard to your overall software spending.
Typically, if this investment is reaching five percent of your overall
yearly software spending, you're on the right level. It’s a big number,
but still it’s worth investing.

Coming with this
message to IT management and getting the ear of a person who is
interested in the topic and then getting the investment authorization,
you've gone through half the journey. Implementation afterward will be
defining your processes, finding the right tool, implementing it, and
running it.

Gardner: When it comes to value to
the end-user, by having an understood, clearly-defined process in place
allows them to get to the software they want, make sure they can use it,
and look for it on a sanctioned list, for example. While some end-users
might see this as a hurdle, I think it enables them eventually to get
the tools they need when they need them.

Smart communication

Kuijper:
Right. At the beginning, every end-user will see all those SAM
processes as a burden or a complication. So you have to invest a lot in
communication, smart communication, with your company and make people
understand that it’s everyone’s responsibility to be [software license] compliant and also
that it can help in recovering money.

If you do this in
a smart way, and the process has a delivery time not longer than three
days, then you're good. You have to ensure, of course, that you have a
software catalog that is up-to-date, with an easy access to your main
titles. All those points from the end-to-end software lifecycle
are implemented -- from software tool, then software delivery, then
software re-usage, software, and also disposal. When all this is lean,
then you’ve made your journey. Then, the software lifecycle process will
not be seen any more as a pain, but it will be seen as a business-enabler.

Gardner: Now, asset management doesn’t
just cover the realm of software. It includes hardware, and in a network
environment, that can be very large numbers of equipment and devices,
endpoints as well as network equipment.

We also have a configuration management tool that
takes the configurations of these devices and runs them against
compliance. We can run them against a gold or a silver build. We can
also run them against security flaws. It gives us an end-to-end
management.

All of this feeds into our ITSM product and then also it feeds into things like the configuration management data base (CMDB). So we have a complete end-to-end knowledge of the software, the hardware, and the services that we're giving the customer.

Gardner:
Knowing yourself and your organization allows for that lifecycle
benefit that Julien referred to. Eventually, that gives you the freedom
to manage and extend those benefits into things like helpdesk support,
even IT operations, where the performance can be maintained better.

Jackson:
Yes, that's 360-degree management from hardware being delivered on-site, to
being discovered, being automatically populated into the multitude of
support and operational systems that we use, and then into the ITSM
side.

If you don’t get it right from the start and you
don’t have the correct models defined for example a Cisco device or the correct OS version on that device, one perhaps where it has security flaws, then you run
the risk of deploying a vulnerable service to the customer.

Thinking about scale

Gardner:
Looking at the different types of tools and approaches, this goes
beyond thinking about assets alone. We're thinking also about scale.
Tell us about your organization, and why the scale and ability to manage
so many devices and information is important?

Jackson: Being a managed service provider (MSP),
we have about 1,000 external customers, and each one of those has a
tailored service, ranging from voice, storage, to data, and cloud. So we need to be able to manage these services that are contained within the 10,000 plus devices that we have.

We
need to understand the service end-to-end. So there’s quite bit of
service level management in there. It all ties down to having the
correct kind of vendor, the correct kind of service mapping, and
information needs to be accurate in the configuration items (CIs), so support can utilize this information.

If
we have an incident that is automatically generated on the management
platforms, it goes into the ITSM platform. We can create an effective
customer list within, say, five minutes of the network outage and then email or
SMS the customer pretty much directly.

We need to understand the service end-to-end. So there’s quite bit of service level management in there.

There’s
more ways of doing it, but it’s all due to having a tight control on
the assets that are out there in the field, having an asset management
tool that can actually control that, and being able to understand the
topology of the network and where everything lies. This gives us the
ability to create relationships between these devices and have
hierarchical logical and physical entities.

Gardner: You have confidence that you work with tools
and platforms that can handle that scale?

Jackson:
All the tools that we have are pretty much carrier-grade. So we can
scale a lot more than the 10,000 devices that we currently have. If you
set it up and plan it right, it doesn’t really matter how many devices
you have in management. You have to have the right processes and structure
to be able to manage them.

Gardner: We've talked about software, hardware, and networks. Nowadays, cloud services, microservices, and APIs are also a big part of the mix. IT consumes them, they make value from them, and they extend that value into the organization.

Let’s
go to Patrick at Steria. How are you seeing in your organization an
evolution of ITSM into a service brokering role? And does the current generation of ITSM tools and platforms give you a road to that
service brokering capacity?

Extending services

Bailly:
What’s needed for becoming a service broker that is we need to offer
the ability to extend the current service that we have to the services
that are available today in the cloud.

To do that, we need to extend the capability of our
framework. Today, our framework has been designed in order to run the
operation on behalf of our customers, to run the operation on the
customer side, or the operation on our data center, but more or less,
traditionally IT. The current ITSM framework is able to do that.

What
we're facing is that we have customers who want to add short-term
[cloud capacity]. We need to offer that capability. What's very
important is to offer one interface toward the customers, and to
integrate across several service providers at the same time.

Bailly: We're an IT service
provider, and we manage different kinds of services from infrastructure
management, application management, business process outsourcing, system
integration, etc., all over Europe. Today, we're leveraging the
capabilities that we have today in India and in Poland.

Gardner:
Now, we've looked at what ITSM does. We haven’t dug into too much about
where it’s going next in terms of what analysis of this data can bring
to the table.

Charl, tell us, please, about how you
see the use of analytics improving what you've been doing in your
setting. How do baseline results from ITSM, the tools we have been
talking about, improve when you start to analyze that data, index it,
cleanse it, and get at the real underlying information that can then be
turned into business benefits?

Joubert: Looking
at inadequacies of your processes is really the start of all of this.
The moment you start scratching at the vast amount of information you
have, you start seeing the errors of your ways, and ways and
opportunities to correct them.

It's really an exciting time in ITSM. We now have the
ability to start mining this magnitude of information that’s being
locked inside attachments in all of these ITSM solutions. We can now
start indexing all that unstructured data and using it. It’s a fantastic
time to be in IT.

Gardner: Give me an example
of where you've seen this at work -- maybe a helpdesk environment. How
can you immediately get benefits from starting to analyze systems and IT
information?

Million interactions

Joubert:
In the service desk I'm involved in, we have about a total of a million
interactions over the past few years. What we've done with big data is
index the categorization of all these interactions.

With tools from HP, Smart Analytics
and Smart Ticketing, we're able to predict the categorization of these
interactions to a accuracy of about 84 percent at the moment. This
assists the service desk agents to more accurately get the correct
information to the correct service teams the first time, with fewer
errors in escalation, which in turn leads to greater customer
satisfaction.

Gardner: Julien, where does the analysis of what you're doing with software asset
management, for example, play a role? Where do you see it going?

Kuijper:
SAM is already quite complex on-premise and we all know today that the
IT world is moving to the cloud, and this is the next challenge of SAM,
because the whole point of the cloud is that you don’t know where your
systems are.

However, the licensing models, as they
are today, refer to CPU, to on-premise, to physical assets.
Understanding how you can adapt your licensing model to this new concept
-- not that new anymore now -- this new concept of cloud is something
to which even the software publishers and vendors have not really
adapted their model.

This is the next challenge of SAM, because the whole point of the cloud is that you don’t know where your systems are.

You
also have to face some vendors or publishers who are not willing to
adapt their model, especially to be able to audit specific customers and
get more revenue. So, on one hand, you have to implement the right
processes and the right tools, which are now going to navigate in a very
complex environment, very difficult to scan, very difficult to analyze.
At the same time, you have to update all your contracts, and sometime,
this will not be possible.

Some vendors will have a
very easy licensing model if you are implementing their software in
their own cloud environment, but in another cloud environment, in a
competitor, they might make this journey quite complicated for you.

So
this will be complex and will be resolved by correct data to analyze
and also some legal workforce and purchasing workforce to try to adapt
the contracts.

Gardner: In many ways right now,
we never really own software. We only lease it or borrow it and we're
charged in a variety of ways. But soon we'll to be going more to that
pay-as-you-use, pay-as-you-consume model. What about the underlying
information associated with those services? Would logs go along with
your cloud services? Should you be able to access that so that you can
analyze it in the context of your other IT infrastructure?

Edward,
any thoughts as a managed services environment and a management of
networks provider. Do you see that as you provide more services that you
are providing insight or ITSM metadata along with the services?

It's
gotten to a point now that we are taking on the managing of bespoke
applications that customers wanted to hand over to Redcentric. So not
only do we have to understand the technology and the operating systems
that go on these platforms in the cloud, but we also have to understand
the bespoke software that’s sitting on them and all the necessary
dependencies for that.

The more that we invest into
cloud technologies, the more complex the service that we offer our
customers becomes. We have a multitude of management systems that can
monitor all the different elements of this and then piece them together
in a service-level model (SLM) perspective. So you get SLM and you get
service assurance on top of that.

Gardner: We've recently heard about HP's IDOL OnDemand and Vertica OnDemand, as part of the Haven OnDemand.
They're bringing these analytics capabilities to cloud services, APIs
as well. As I understand it, they're going to be applying them to more
IT operations issues. So it’s quite possible that we'll start to see a
mash up, if you will, between a cloud service, but also the underlying
IT information associated with that service.

Let’s go
back to Patrick at Steria. Any thoughts about where this combination of
ITSM within a cloud environment develops? How do you see it going?

Bailly: The system today exists for traditional IT, and we also have to
have the tooling for designing and consuming cloud services. We are
running HP Service Manager for traditional IT, legacy IT, and we are
running HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA) for managing and operating in
the cloud.

We’d like to have a unique way for
reconciling the catalog of services that are in Service Manager with
the catalog of services that are in CSA, and we would need to have a
single, unique portal for doing that.

What we're expecting with HP Propel
is to offer the capabilities to aggregate services that are coming from
various sources and to extend that by also offering them. When we're
serving this live, we need to offer some additional features like
collaboration, incident management, access to the knowledge base,
collaboration between service desk and end user, collaboration between
end users, etc.

There's also another important point
and that is service integration. As a service provider, we will have to
deliver and control the services that are delivered by some partners and
by some cloud service providers.

In order to do that,
we need to have strong integration, not only partnership, but also
strong integration. And that integration should be multiple point,
meaning that, as soon as we're able to integrate a service provider with
this, that integration will be de facto available for our other
customers. We're expecting that from HP Propel.

And it’s
not only an integration for provisioning service, but it’s also an
integration for running the other processes, collaboration, incident
management, etc.

Gardner: Patrick mentioned HP Propel, do any of you also have some experience with that or are looking at it to solve other problems?

Single view

Joubert:
We're definitely looking at it to give a single view for all our end
users. There are various supportive partners in the area where I work.
The end user really wants one place to ask for fixing a broken light, to
fixing a broken PC, to installing software. It's ease of use that
they're looking for. So yes, we are definitely looking at Propel.

Gardner: Let’s take another look to the future. We've heard quite a bit about the Internet of Things (IoT) -- more devices, more inputs, and more data. Do you think that’s
something that’s going to be an issue for ITSM, or is that something
separate? Do you view that the infrastructure that’s being created for
ITSM lends itself to something like managing the IoT and more devices on
a network?

Kuijper:
For me, as asset management experts and software asset management
experts, we have to draw a line somewhere and say, "There is this IoT,
and there is some data that we have to say we don’t want to analyze."
There are things that are here on the Internet. That’s fine, but too
much engineering around that might be over-killing the processes.

We also have to be very careful about false good ideas. I personally think that bring your own device (BYOD)
is a false good idea. It brings tremendous issues with regards to who
takes care of an asset that is personally owned by a person in a
corporate environment, who deals with IT.

Today, it’s
perfect. I bring the computer that I'm used to in the office. Tomorrow,
it’s broken. Who is going to fix it? When I buy software for this
machine, who is going to pay for it and who's going to be responsible
for non-compliance?

We also have to be very careful about false good ideas. I personally think that bring your own device is a false good idea.

A
CIO might think it’s very intelligent and very advanced to allow people
to use what they're used to, but the legal issues behind it are quite
complicated. I would say this is a false good idea.

Gardner:
Edward, you mentioned that at Redcentric, scale doesn’t concern you.
You're pretty confident that the systems that you can access can handle
almost any scale. How about that IoT? Even if it shouldn’t be in the
purview legally or in terms of the role of IT, it does seem like the
systems that have been developed for ITSM are applicable to this issue.
Any thoughts about more and more devices on a network?

Jackson:
In terms of the scale of things, if the elements are in your control
and you have some structure and management around them. You don’t need
to be overly concerned. We certainly don’t keep anything in our systems
their shouldn’t be in there or doesn’t need to be.

Going
forward, things like big data and smart analytics layered on top would
give us a massive benefit in how we could deliver our service, and more
importantly, how we can manage the service.

Once you
have your processes is in place, and can understand the necessity of
those processes, you have the structure, and you have the kind of
management platform that your sure is going to handle the data, then you
can basically leverage things like big data, smart analytics, and data
mining to enable you to offer a sophisticated level of support that
perhaps your competitors can’t.

Esoteric activity

Gardner:
It's occurred to me that the data and the management of that ITSM data is central
to any of these major challenges, whether it’s big data,
cloud service brokering, management of assets for legal or jurisdiction compliance. ITSM has become much more prominent,
and is in the position to solve many more problems.

I'd
like to end our conversation with your thoughts along those lines.
Charl, ITSM, is it more important than ever? How has it become central?

Joubert:
Absolutely. With the advent of big data, we suddenly have the tools to
start mining this information and using it to our benefit to give better
service to our end-users.

With the advent of big data, we suddenly have the tools to start mining
this information and using it to our benefit to give better service to
our end users.

Kuijper: ITSM is definitely
core to any IT environment, because ITSM is the way to put the correct
price tag behind a service. We have service charging and service
costing. If you don’t do that correctly, then you basically don’t tell
the truth to your customer or to your end user.

If you
mix this with the IoT and the possibility to have anything with an IP
address available on the network, then you enter into more philosophical
thoughts. In a corporate environment, let’s assume you have a tag on
your car keys that helps you to find them, and that is linked on the
Internet. Those gizmos are happening today.

This
brings some personal life information into your corporate environment.
What does the corporate environment do about this? The brand of your car
is on your car tag. They will know that you bought a brand new car.
They will know all this information which is personal. So we have to
think about ethics as well.

So drawing a line of what
the corporate environment will take care and what is private will be
essential in this IOT. When you have your mobile phone, is it personal,
it is business? Drawing a line will be very important.

Gardner: But at least we will have the means to draw that line and then enforce the drawing of that line.

Kuijper: Right. Totally correct.

Gardner: Edward, the role of ITSM, bigger than ever or not so much?

Bigger than ever

Jackson:
I think it’s bigger than ever. It’s the front end of your business, and
the back-end of your business its what the customers see. It’s how you
deliver your service, and if you haven’t got it right, then you are not
going to be able to deliver the service that a customer expects.

You
might have the best products in the world, but if your ITSM systems and
your ITSM team aren’t doing what they're supposed to be doing then you
know it’s not going to be any good, and the customers are going to say
that.

Gardner: And lastly to Steria, and Patrick, the role of ITSM, bigger than ever? How do you view it?

Bailly: For
me, the role of IT Service Management (ITSM) won't change. We did ITSM
in the past and we still continue to have that in the future. In order
to deliver any service, we need to have the detailed configuration of
the service. We will have to run processes and not have the service
change. What will change in the future is the diversity of service
providers that we use.

As a service provider, we'll have to walk
with a lot of other service providers. So the SLA will be more complex
to manage for service management. It will be critical. For the customer,
you will have to not only manage — but to govern — that service even if
it is provided by lot of service providers.

Gardner: So the complexity goes up, and therefore the need to manage that complexity also needs to go up.

Bailly: What is also very important in license management in the cloud is that very often the return on investment (ROI)
of the cloud adoption has ignored or minimized the impact of software
cost. When you tell your customers, internal or external, that this xyz
cloud offer will cost them that amount of money, you will most likely
have to add up 20-30 percent because of the impact of the software cost
afterward.

Gardner: I am afraid we will have to
leave it there. We've been talking to a panel of experts about IT
service management and its role in a hybrid computing world. We’ve found
out how the future of analytics plays into ITSM, big data included, as
well as many of the other scaling issues around mobility, IoT, and the
licensing and legal issues around all assets in IT.

So a
big thank you to our panel, Charl Joubert, a change and configuration expert based in Pretoria, South Africa; Julien Kuijper, an expert in asset and license management based in Paris; Patrick Bailly, IT Quality and Process Director at Steria in Paris, and Edward Jackson, Operational System Support Manager at Redcentric in the UK.

And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining us for this
special new style of IT discussion. I'm
Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for
this ongoing series of HP-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for
joining us, and don’t forget to come back next time.